The company believes that this solution helps in combating “actual front running” and helps their customers by reserving the domain name.Â This “solution” does nothing however to prevent another registrant from picking up the domain name. If the orignal searcher comes back 10 minutes later to register the domain, another user could still purchase this domain.Â The only thing this solution seems to be preventing is fair trade as another registrar is being prevented from selling the domain name to a potential customer.

“#1 | By Jon Nevett | Dec 06, 07 @01:53 pm PST
I’m Jon Nevett, Vice President of Policy at Network Solutions. Regarding Nominet’s study of domain name front running, I don’t know about .co.uk, but the practice certainly exists in gTLD space. Based on our experience and investigations, we disagree with the suggestion that front running cases are merely coincidental with other online activities, and that the problem is little more than a “public perception” issue. Our customers certainly have suffered from this troubling practice, and other registrars have stated the same thing. We are in a much better position than registries to know that it’s happening. Something should be done to protect consumers from such practices—it cannot wait for endless ICANN studies and policy development. Unfortunately, the failure to act is undermining consumer confidence in the domain registration process.”

I have to agree. They are digging a hole which I hope turns into their grave. Isn’t there an attorney reading these posts that wants to start a class action lawsuit. This has to be bending their agreement with ICANN not to mention a few business laws. They stole one from my wife yesterday and I can assure you that I will never use them. In fact, I’m moving my company’s domain registration from them to another registrar today. I do not deal with people like this.

[…] that has some moral standards and ethics. Who is falling for this explanation? We will just quote Domain Name News:The company believes that this solution helps in combating “actual front running” and helps […]

I got caught in the Network Solutions scam yesterday and it leaves a nasty taste in your mouth being denied the opportunity to choose your registrar and having to pay more than three times the common rate for registration.

I emailed them once registration was confirmed and indicated that I thought their practice of registering or trapping names that had been searched for at their site was unethical and that I would try to warn as many people as I could. I have not had a response.

I believe that what we are experiencing with Network Solutions is evidence that, when a company can’t compete on innovation, service and price, an unethical company will resort to scams.

I don’t care about the VP Ethics spin – if it looks, runs and stings like a scam – then it’s a scam!

[…] public relations staff quickly went into damage control with a unified response that their actions were designed to protect customers against front-running. In a further attempt at damage control and amongst the public outcry, NSI quickly adjusted their […]

[…] it. If you then tried to register it anywhere but at NSI, it would be listed as unavailable. They claimed that they were doing this to protect their “customers” from becoming victims of front-running by other […]

Surely if NSI are claiming this is simply a service for their potential customer to allow them time to make up their mind about purchase – any potential customer would be able to make this purchase at the usual rates ie. $8-10